Where the Heart Is

There's a plain and simple fact here: This is a good show!! It is a soap opera, and it is good. Yes, I never thought I would say this about a soap but this real. It is a real show about real people with real lives and it's normal!! That's the difference with British soap actors and American ones: The British ones are actors, the American ones are stars! ACTOR-STAR they are not the same thing. While American soaps(shows,movies etc.) focus on how perfect someone looks and how much money the show makes, British shows care about quality, both dramatic and visual. "Where The Heart Is", is a wonderful example and I highly recommend searching your local listings for it. Another great UK show is "Ballykissangel"......A-C-T-I-N-G!!!!!!!!!!

'Coronation Street' is a good example of a long-running British drama that has been on United Kingdom TV's longer than any American soap. Other drama series like 'Heartbeat' and 'Ballykissangel' are right up there, and 'Where the Heart Is' is on its way to joining the ranks.

In only its fourth season, WTHI has quickly become one of the favorites. Now the show is popular in Canada, a few networks there have picked up last season to show. Unfortunately WTHI is not shown in the states, but I got my hands on a video taping of the second season. And there is no comparison.

WTHI is a great British dramatic series about real families, real problems, real people and real love in a small Yorkshire town. You can share the lives and loves of sisters-in-law Peggy Snow and Ruth Goddard. Some have called this series "sugar-coated" but don't knock it until you have seen it.

The British must know something we Americans do not, many programs they show are based on real life, not what the ideal kind of person is. Imperfections are not looked upon in the media. I think we should all take a cue. And watch this show if you can, I'd move over to England just to see it if I could.

I thought this show had promise until Jackie came along. That was start of a fast decline into moronic teenage sex and babies without real parents all over the place. Worthy of soap opera status but not much else. Once Peggy dies it gets even worse. Actually by season 4 it was so awful I was skipping through it at a fast pace. Vic was the best of a cast of characters. Everyone else is pretty boring and messed up. I particularly did not like characters just disappearing with no heads up. What happened to Chris? And good grief. All the main characters who can are flaming alcoholics. I believe it's a tie between Jess and Jackie for the worst characters.

I was running out of good shows to watch during this quarintine of 2020 and stumbled on this on Amazon. I have watched and liked several British shows and to me this is probably my favorite. This is not a soap opera as we think of them in the US. It's a very good series about people who seem real and worth getting to know.

I really enjoy the stories and the characters. The only complaint I have is that the same actors don't play the characters for the whole series. It's disappointing not to see the same people that were the main characters in the first year after you've watched it for awhile. In the case of some, it's just like they ":disappear" and then maybe someone else plays the character, or not.

All in all though, I'd say it's a very good show and worth the time to watch.

The first episode raises high hopes that we are going to get interesting stories based around the work of district nurses responding to medical situations and their moral and social consequences. At last, I thought, I can enjoy the delicious Sarah Lancashire in something that is not truly awful ( such as Last Tango in Halifax or the indescribably horrendous Happy Valley ) and with the lovely Pam Ferris involved it might actually be positively good.

But no: what we get is a soap and we pay for our modest pleasures with banal cliché-ridden scripts ( the highest count of "we are always here for you" in any drama I can recall ); dreary, moronic teenagers dominating the screen with their tedious sex-lives; endless homilies about how great it is up north; and rapidly decreasing plausibility with nurses going everywhere in pairs and only dealing with one patient per day.

And those were the good times.

Series 1 is just about watchable due to Lancashire, Ferris, and the rugby sub-plot.

Series 2 takes a dive with the arrival of the ghastly Jacqui but is kept afloat by, again, rugby, Lancashire and Ferris

By series 3 we are heading down the slope at pace with characters being ludicrously transformed into effectively different people unsupported by any dramatic logic; Jacqui, sadly, not being transformed; key plots turning on aspects of business life about whose rudiments the writers are plainly totally ignorant ( as they are about everything: "I was fly-half at Cambridge - I was in the Blues" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ); and a complete absence of any humour to balance the awfulness.

I bailed out half-way through series 4 for reasons that will become obvious to anyone else who gets that far.

I could say more about why this programme was such a missed opportunity to make something decent out of a reasonable idea and some good resources but, unlike some other reviewers here who have no grasp of the basics of common courtesy, I refuse to engage in massive and ruining spoilers.